What is an HR Compliance Checklist?
An HR compliance checklist is a document that aims to help Human Resources (HR) professionals to stay on top of their duties and responsibilities. This checklist can also be used to ensure a business is compliant with different labor laws.
Key Areas Necessary to HR Compliance
HR professionals and personnel are tasked by a business to ensure compliance with company policies, as well as their country and city’s labor laws, safety standards, and more. They are involved in all things human resources as well as employee experience, engagement, and satisfaction, such as creating policies, documenting them, enforcing them, and managing training sessions to ensure employee growth.
Specifically, HR works to ensure compliance with the following:
- Addressing discrimination in the workplace, from hiring to employee stay
- Interviewing possible talents or hires with utmost respect only
- Documenting and recording policies and noncompliance with them
- Keeping compliant with different legal regulation changes
- Classifying employees according to their jobs properly
- Providing proper support to employees of all tenure and job descriptions
- Facilitating seamless employee onboarding and offboarding
- Protecting employee rights
- Training employees and upskilling them regularly
What Should be in an HR Compliance Checklist?
To create your HR compliance checklist, it is important first to be aware of the necessary policies, laws, and standards you must comply with. These will be the basis for knowing what needs to be complied with.
After, identify the gaps that need to be addressed by these and how they can be enforced or better done so. You can then create new policies or enforce methods based on this, which you must communicate and cascade down to employees and properly train them.
Depending on the business type and industry, each HR team will have different needs to consider. Typically, an HR compliance audit checklist includes sections for the following business and HR needs:
- Date of last HR compliance audit
- Status update on documentation regarding employee issues, recognitions, evaluation, and terminations
- Status update on general documentation practices
- Compliance status with company policies
- Compliance status with international and specific country, city, or state laws
- Number of employees
- Payroll status
- Total purchases credited to business expense
- Number of violations, both minor and major violations
Here is a sample HR compliance audit checklist in use for reference:
FAQs about HR Compliance Checklists
The whole HR team should be aware of the HR compliance checklist and use it. However, it is often the head of the team who creates and manages it.
Yes, all countries have legal regulations for HR compliance that all businesses must comply with. These regulations can be their own laws, or be part of a broader labor law. These laws may also be different per country, as well as per city or state, depending on how a country operates and its culture.
To efficiently create, manage, and store your HR compliance checklists, it would be best to utilize a digital solution. By going digital, you can save time with your document management, as well as improve your documentation processes.